One of the most frequent questions I get is, How do I get my child to listen to me? What lingers in the roots just beneath this question is, How do I get her to respect me? The two are intimately entwined. As so often happens with Life’s sticky questions, sometimes we can unstick things a bit by turning the question around: rather than How can I get my child to listen to me, we can get far more traction with How can I make myself more “listenable”? {Find out how by reading the 5 tips at mothering.com}
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epSos.de under Creative Commons license
This post features a personal story illustrating what I call “counter-intuitive brilliance.” It’s the story of an interaction between a new father and a new mother. It’s about how to diaper their baby. It’s a conversation that surely takes place alongside the changing table in virtually every home where there are new parents blessed with a newborn. But this conversation went very differently.
But what about men and pregnancy? What are a father’s experiences during those wondrous nine months? How does the attachment process begin for them? Is a father’s only option to look on with wonder (and sometimes envy) at the beautiful relationship forming between his once-doting partner and this tiny interloper?
The very word itself… yogini …sounds like the image of Jeannine Parvati Baker in full-flowering asana mastery: lithe stems curling around o-so-full center of heartful breath. At once elfin and elegant. A bold design, a weaver of words. Alive forever in our memory.
The spring season is all about ripeness, fertility and the regeneration of life. These are also the qualities of a woman’s menstrual cycle, and yet we’re not quite as breathlessly delighted for the arrival of our flow as we are for springtime!
Throughout my childhood, I was matter-of-fact about the idea of having another mother out there somewhere. I remember fantasizing only once or twice that she was really one of my mother’s friends, someone I’d known all along. When my father asked me, soon after my mother died, if I wanted to find my birthmother, my interest blossomed from its dormancy.
